Science Fiction Cities

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Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Publications and Presentations Planning

12-2013 Science Fiction Cities

Carl Abbott Portland State University, [email protected]

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Citation Details Abbott, Carl, (2013). Science Fiction Cities. Deletion: The Open Access Online Forum in Science Fiction, Episode 2.

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Blade Runner body British cinema Cities Cognitive dissonance Carl Abbott, School of Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University, Creative piece Creative USA | writing Design

Nothing says trouble like a city smashed to smithereens on screen. Meteors and DoctorWho Dr Who earthquakes, tsunamis and glaciers, earthly monsters and alien invaders – moviegoers DW Dystopia might think that the only thing science fiction does with cities is demolish them with big Editorial environment Fan budget special effects. Giant waves crash over New York in Deluge (1933), an asteroid studies Fantasy pulverizes it in Deep Impact (1998), and ice crushes it in The Day After Tomorrow Feminism fiction Film (2004). Everyone knows that the star of Godzilla: King of Monsters (1956) has it in for Gender Gravity Kubrick Literary Tokyo. Los Angeles takes hits in Earthquake (1974) and Independence Day (1996) – whose flying saucer bad guys also take out New York, Washington, and Paris, itself dystopia Literature soon re-obliterated in Armageddon (1998). Not to be outdone, screenwriters for 2012 Narrative novel post- (2009) devised a planetary cataclysm to eradicate Los Angeles, Washington, Rome, apocalyptic queer Race Robotics and every other city lower than Tibet. Romance in science fiction Science fiction Science fictionality Science fiction pleasures Science fiction sound sci fi sexuality score sound space Television Time Travel Utopias Video young adult SF Look again and the picture is far more interesting. Cities certainly perish on the science fiction screen and page, but they also grow, thrive, and decline in complex and @DeletionSciFi on Twitter intriguing ways. Hit the science fiction section at your local library or used bookstore for the pure pleasure of browsing the covers. Among the exotic planetscapes, cosmic vistas, and battling starships are cities seen from above and below, from near and afar. Cities soar in the distant view of foregrounded heroes and shelter beneath transparent domes like gigantic snow globes. Tiny humans and all manner of other creatures clog crowded street corners and thread their way among the intricate towers, tunnels, sky bridges, wiring, and plumbing of the coming metropolis. Artists bathe their visions with the patina of fantasy or the shimmer of high-tech.

http://www.deletionscifi.org/episodes/episode-2/science-fiction-cities/ 1/5 Science fiction cities - Deletion We – the majority of humankind – already inhabit an urban world and share an urban Tweets Follow future. Cities are home to a majority of our planet’s population, and they’re gaining a greater edge over the countryside with each passing year. The world crossed the 50-50 Deletion 6 Oct threshold between city life and rural life in 2008 according to the United Nations @DeletionSciFi Department of Economic and Social Affairs. China passed the same milestone at the Episode 7 features wonderful work end of 2011 with an official count of 691 million city dwellers. By the end of the century, by Isiah Lavender III, Elana Gomel, Andy Hageman, David McCooey, the worldwide ratio is likely to be 3 to 1 or even 4 to 1 – or 75-80 percent urban – the and Mhairi McIntyre. balance already reached in Western Europe and North America and exceeded in Australia. Deletion 6 Oct @DeletionSciFi Since our mundane future will be so decidedly urban, it is no surprise that the science New Episode of Deletion is now fiction imagination has generated cities by the bucketful. Cities are background and online! 'Retrospective Futures' setting for stories on and off future earth, often assumed as a natural part of coming explores the past haunting the society. They are sometimes an active part of the plot, places whose characteristics are futures of SF ow.ly/ClwpD essential to a story’s contests and conflicts. Sometimes they become actors in their own right, intervening and shaping as well as framing the action. The future, the native Deletion 3 Aug homeland of science fiction, will be an urban future for all foreseeable generations. It’s @DeletionSciFi like a syllogism: Deletion Episode 6: “Is There Any Such Thing as Young Adult Science Fiction?” is now LIVE! Science fiction is about the future. deletionscifi.org/current-episod… ow.ly/i/6rh56 The human future will be urban.

Therefore: Science fiction should be about urban futures.

What’s a city, by the way? With lots of small variations, historians and archeologists agree that cities are big, densely developed, and full of difference – different types people, jobs, neighborhoods, and economic activities. They are also points of exchange Expand that influence people outside their boundaries, as anthropologist Michael Smith Deletion 1 Aug emphasizes. People come to cities to trade goods, services, ideas, and their own labor. @DeletionSciFi More than anything else, a city is a device for making connections, so large space Dystoipas, body-merging, queer stations like Babylon 5 and Pell Station in C. J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station are cities. possibilities, people-eating, gender Most of all, cities are systems for creating innovation and change, because the best powers, and faerie violence collide in way for any of us to come up with a new idea is to bring us in contact with strangers next Deletion (launched Monday!) and their strange opinions. Deletion 1 Aug There is some resistance to an urban @DeletionSciFi orientation in science fiction. Critic Gary Where lie the links between sci fi, fantasy, and utopian fiction?: "above Wolfe argues that cities are basically all, because they are each tales of antithetical to the science fiction wonder" (Andrew Milner, 2012) imagination. Cities, he suggests, represent confinement, limitations on possibility, the known rather than the Tweet to @DeletionSciFi unknown. They are stasis rather than change, contrary to the science fiction spirit of adventure and discovery (and certainly city-as-limitation has been a regular #scifi on Twitter theme since Arthur Clarke’s The City and the Stars). This position goes beyond a simple negative evaluation of city life (cities as jungles, cities as sources of eco- catastrophe) to a larger position that, in effect, cities are useful only to serve the spaceports that allow authors to launch their stories into unfamiliar territory.

I argue the contrary – that cities can also be front and center as vividly imagined worlds whose characteristics play active roles that help to structure the arc of the story, forcing and constraining the choices that the characters make. For earthly cities, for example, the Los Angeles of Octavia Butler in Parable of the Sower and the Bangkok of Paolo Baciagalupi in The Wind-Up Girl fill the bill. Their state of physical and social decay is an essential drive force for their developing plots. New Crobuzon is as much a force in China Miéville’s novels as London was for Charles Dickens. Cities are sentient actors in Greg Bear’s Strength of Stones and John Shirley’s City Come A-Walkin.

As we think about SF cities, consider additional syllogisms that suggest two of the basic http://www.deletionscifi.org/episodes/episode-2/science-fiction-cities/ 2/5 Science fiction cities - Deletion and inclusive ways that SF approaches cities. One strand derives from the #scifi technological/design imagination and its ability to think up cities whose form and function depend on and express new technical possibilities. The second approach is Scott Bury 2m the desire to explore the future of social and cultural systems that find their most @ScottTheWriter developed and conflicted forms in cities. Together the physical and social imaginations INFERNO book 2 in create two big clusters of city types. @FrederickBrooke's Drone Wars- Does Matt have a chance? Does the USA? #scifi #thriller ow.ly/EsfGd Science fiction is about the implications of new technologies. Expand

KindleBookPromos 2m Cities are the most complex of technological artifacts. @freebookpromos ♡ EXTENDED FREEBIE: #Fantasy Therefore, science fiction is [often] about the physical and technological #SciFI - Reluctant Gods top Kindle Seller FREE to Oct. 31: possibilities of city-making. bit.ly/1eCmmNR

Science fiction tries to explore the future of human society. Afobos 4m @Afobos Cities are the central organizing system for human society. The 80's were never like this. The Body Glove #Superhero #SciFi dld.bz/ckNnu Body Glove II is out as Therefore, science fiction is [often] about complex life in future cities. well! Show Summary The first strand reaches back to early efforts to imagine the shape of ideal cities, both Ellie Garratt 12m fantastical schemes like Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602) and @EllieMGarratt bureaucratic prescriptions like the Laws on the Indies that the Spanish crown 'These stories do not just promulgated as a guide to laying out colonial cities. The impulse continued in the entertain...but also make you think.' proposals of early industrial era reformers like Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, who bit.ly/1au6DT9 #SciFi #Kindle were engrossed with schemes for social betterment through rethinking the physical @UnRealms pic.twitter.com/j9ltQDuVUD structure of settlements. These were the ‘utopian socialists’ whom Friedrich Engels pointedly criticized for ignoring the primacy of the social and economic relations that determined spatial patterns.

More directly, much science fiction stretches and extends the ideas of twentieth century design utopians. Ambitious and self-confident architects and planners like Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Constantinos Doxiades, and Paolo Soleri would never have thought of themselves as offering science fictions. Nevertheless, their versions of ideal cities – to be realized in the future – tilt toward the fantastic. Many SF writers, from Expand Robert Silverberg to J. G. Ballard, have adapted and explored the implications of Corbusier’s ‘radiant city’ and Paolo Soleri’s visionary self-contained megabuildings that On A Sixpence 15m he termed arcologies. @onasixpence My tribute to #scifi film classics in a periodic-table art print. In the second strand, SF draws on urban studies and social science. Nineteenth bit.ly/1bhpWh8 century fears of cities as cauldrons of social disorder and political chaos fueled the pic.twitter.com/pHN883OLNF urban dystopias that appear again and again in imagined futures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The loosely grouped set of cyperpunk writers from the 1980s and 1990s reflected critical urban theory around cities as communication systems and the effects of economic globalization. Samuel R. Delany has acknowledged that the Unlicensed Sector in Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976) is ‘a Jane Jacobs kind of thing’ while drawing the subtitle from the work of Michel Foucault. Expand I’m a historian and urban studies specialist who has been exploring science fiction scholarship for the past decade. After finishing one book on frontier narratives in U.S. Tweet #scifi science fiction, I’m now engaged on a mirror image project about the different types of city that keep reappearing in speculative fiction – deserted cities, feral suburbs, city as machine, city as bazaar. We keep telling variations on a number of received narratives (or parabolas, to apply Brian Attebery’s term) like the ‘escape to freedom from the confining city’ story or the ‘ultimate highrise’ story. If anyone would like to share their favorite SF city or city type, I’d be glad to hear from you.

Works Cited

Attebery, Brian, and Veronica Hollinger. Parabolas of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: http://www.deletionscifi.org/episodes/episode-2/science-fiction-cities/ 3/5 Science fiction cities - Deletion Wesleyan University Press, 2013.

Delany, Samuel. ‘On Triton and Other Matters: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany.’ Science Fiction Studies 17.3 (1990), accessed at http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/delany52interview.htm

Engels, Friedrich. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. Chicago: C. H. Kerr and Co., 1900.

Smith, Michael. ‘What is a City? Definitions of the Urban.’ 2011. http://wideurbanworld.blogspot.com/2011/02/what-is-city-definitions-of-urban.html

Wolfe, Gary. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979.

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Bio: Carl Abbott has taught history, urban studies and planning at Portland State University (Oregon) in five decades (not fifty years!). In addition to several books about history and planning in North American cities, he is the author of Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West as well as several articles on science fiction in urban history and planning journals and in Science Fiction Studies.